The hour passed in more pleasant converse.  The cripple’s mind was evidently coaxed from its wrong and unhappy thoughts.  When Ruth rose to leave, promising to come again as soon as she could get into town, Mercy was plainly softened.

“You just hate to come—­ I know you do!” she said, but she said it wistfully.  “Everybody hates to come to see me.  But I don’t mind having you come as much as I do them.  Oh, yes; you can come again if you will,” and she gave Ruth her hand at parting.

Mrs. Curtis put her arms about the girl from the Red Mill and kissed her warmly at the door.

“Dear, dear!” said the cripple’s mother, “how your own mother would have loved you, if she had lived until now.  You are like sunshine in the house.”

So, after waving her hand and smiling at the cripple in the window, Ruth went slowly back to the corner to meet Helen, and found herself wiping some tender tears from her eyes because of Mrs. Curtis’s words.

CHAPTER XVIII

 The spelling bee

In spite of the fact that the big girls at the district school, led by Julia Semple, whose father was the chairman of the board of trustees, had very little to say to Ruth Fielding, and shunned her almost altogether outside of the schoolroom, Ruth was glad of her chance to study and learn.  She brought home no complaints to Aunt Alvirah regarding the treatment she received from the girls of her own class, and of course uncle Jabez never spoke to her about her schooling, nor she to him.

At school Ruth pleased Miss Cramp very much.  She had gradually worked her way toward the top of the class—­ and this fact did not make her any more friends.  For a new scholar to come into the school and show herself to be quicker and more thorough in her preparation for recitations than the older scholars naturally made some of the latter more than a little jealous.

Up to this time Ruth had never been to the big yellow house on the hill—­ “Overlook,” as Mr. Macy Cameron called his estate.  Always something had intervened when Ruth was about to go.  But Helen and Tom insisted upon the very next Saturday following the girls’ trip to Cheslow as the date when Ruth must come to the big house to luncheon.  The Camerons lived all of three miles from the Red Mill; otherwise Ruth would in all probability have been to her chum’s home before.

Tom agreed to run down in the machine for his sister’s guest at half-past eleven on the day in question, and Ruth hurried her tasks as much as possible so as to be all ready when he appeared in the big drab automobile.  She even rose a little earlier, and the way she flew about the kitchen and porch at her usual Saturday morning tasks was, as Aunt Alvirah said, “a caution.”  But before Tom appeared Ruth saw, on one of her excursions into the yard, the old, dock-tailed, bony horse of Jasper Parloe drawing that gentleman in his rickety wagon up to the mill door.